as primary, resembling the impulse to
empty a full bladder. The other impulse is the "instinct to approach,
touch, and kiss another person, usually of the opposite sex"; this he
terms the _impulse of contrectation_, and he includes under this head not
only the tendency to general physical contact, but also the psychic
inclination to become generally interested in a person of the opposite
sex. Each of these primary impulses Moll regards as forming a constituent
of the sexual instinct in both men and women. It seems to me undoubtedly
true that these two impulses do correspond to the essential phenomena. The
awkward and unsatisfactory part of Moll's analysis is the relation of the
one to the other. It is true that he traces both impulses back to the
sexual glands, that of detumescence directly, that of contrectation
indirectly; but evidently he does not regard them as intimately related to
each other; he insists on the fact that they may exist apart from each
other, that they do not appear synchronously in youth: the contrectation
impulse he regards as secondary; it is, he states, an indirect result of
the sexual glands, "only to be understood by the developmental history of
these glands and the object which they subserve"; that is to say, that it
is connected with the rise of the sexual method of reproduction and the
desirability of the mingling of the two sexes in procreation, while the
impulse of detumescence arose before the sexual method of reproduction had
appeared; thus the contrectation impulse was propagated by natural
selection together with the sexual method of reproduction. The impulse of
contrectation is secondary, and Moll even regards it as a secondary sexual
character.

While, therefore, this analysis seems to include all the phenomena and to
be worthy of very careful study as a serious and elaborate attempt to
present an adequate psychological definition of the sexual impulse, it
scarcely seems to me that we can accept it in precisely the form in which
Moll presents it. I believe, however, that by analyzing the process a
little more minutely we shall find that these two constituents of the
sexual impulse are really much more intimately associated than at the
first glance appears, and that we need by no means go back to the time
when the sexual method of reproduction arose to explain the significance
of the phenomena which Moll includes under the term contrectation.

To discover the true significance of the